Multitasking Teens: Are they being more efficient or just wasting time?

Sunday, Mar 19,2017

Ever checked to determine if your student is doing their homework only to find them paying attention to music, chatting on their phone, checking their social media sites and doing their homework at the same time?

Multitasking is that the new reality that the majority teens have grown up with, however does it mean that they are doing a number of tasks badly or are they actually being economical? The answer to the present question depends largely on the individual learner and the type of tasks they're performing.

The average student spends seven hours a day using electronic devices and 58 percent say they multitask while doing homework. Studies are ongoing as to what the influence of multitasking and electronic devices will have on cognitive and social development, but there are very sensible ways to measure whether multitasking contains a positive or negative impact on your student’s ability to study or do their homework.

A Stanford University study found that when students switch from one task to a different, it negatively affects their ability to think critically or evaluate. Multitasking students were hampered when making an attempt to discern that info was important and that they had to reorient themselves whenever they went back to a task that truly wasted more time than multitasking saved.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that 47% of scholars who spent more than 16 hours a day multitasking received lower grades (lower C’s) than students who spent less time on electronic devices. Whereas these examples are extreme, there's proof that the brain extremely isn’t very sensible at juggling a lot of tasks at a time. Professor Earl Millar, an MIT neuroscientist, scanned volunteer’s brains as they multitasked and found that only one or two of the visual stimulants might activate the brain at any given time.

This is especially true when we try to perform 2 tasks that use the same areas of the brain. For example if you're attempting to send a tweet while writing an essay, your brain becomes overloaded and simply slows down.

Not all multitasking is dangerous.Some studies have shown that taking part in instrumental or classic music quietly in the background will truly improve concentration and better cognitive functioning whereas having a range of sources of data open can help scale back the amount of time students pay on analysis.

If multitasking is restricted to 2 separate tasks that need totally different parts of the brain, then it will be successfully accomplished. Limit the quantity of distractions your students have and try to encourage them to target one task at a time when they are studying or doing their homework.

Test this out for yourself! Conduct sensible tests to determine how your student fares when multitasking. Set out a number of similar tasks like multiple selection science queries or math issues. Get your student to try to solve one of them whereas multitasking and the other while that specialize in the task at hand. Compare accuracy and time taken to determine what works best for them.